French translation

Langue française

Language Connect provides professional French into English and English into French translations. Our mother tongue French translators only translate into French and habitually use French so that they are continuously up-to-date with the language's evolution. For further information visit our translation services page.

French is today spoken as a first language by a large Francophone population of 70 million people, chiefly in France (55 million speakers), Belgium (3 million), Switzerland (1.5 million), former French and Belgian colonies in Africa (5 million), and Canada (6.5 million). French is the third most spoken language in the European Union, after English and German respectively. Having served as an international language in diplomacy and commerce as well as among educated people during the last few centuries, it still enjoys great prestige culturally and is one of the languages used officially by the United Nations.

The way French speakers pronounce and write their own language varies from one place to another and is strongly dependent on the local culture, customs and neighbouring influences. There are remarkable pronunciation differences between the French spoken in southern France, northern France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and the many French speaking African countries. So much so that people from one country may not understand someone from another.

France has won 12 Nobel Prizes for literature more than any other country. French is the idiom of great writers and philosophers such as Molière, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Proust, Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Camus, and Sartre.

In recent years, French has been virtually inundated with English words of all kinds - so much so that the resulting jargon has been dubbed Franglais, a combination of Français (French) and Anglais (English). A few examples among hundreds are le hamburger, le drugstore, le week-end, le tee-shirt, le chewing gum, and les blue-jeans.

And a few faux amis to watch out for...

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